How did you come up with the idea and why did you want to create it?

It's a very interesting story because I am an IT professional.

And every time I get my ballot, I actually have my ballot here with me.

I just have seven pages of name, just names after name, double side.

So I have no idea most of who these people are.

I know who the presidents are when it's a presidential election.

I know who the governors are sometimes.

I think they have an 18 now, but yeah, it's pretty close to the latest model.

I'd love you to kind of talk about, you know, what it is, why you started this and kind of who it's for and what it does.

Yeah, I started this because I'm an IT professional.

And every time I get my ballot, actually, I have my ballot here, that it's seven pages of names that for most of these names of these candidates, I don't know who they are.

I might know the president, or I will know the president, presidential candidates.

I might know the governors and the city mayors, and that's it.

So the rest of the names on these seven pages, I just have no idea who they are.

And those few names I do know, I just know from the TV ads.

And what do you want? Do you want this to live on for future elections? Like what's, you know, pie in the sky? As much as we can,

Any other thoughts? Ali? Shu?

The question is that, um, is there one thing that we can think of that we could do today that will give people more faith in the system that we have? Well, of course, the immediate thing Election Simplified does is to give transparency.

However, I think there is a... that's only the first step.

The deeper issue or the deeper thing we can take is that the governmental system itself is a tool to govern our lives, to, you know, organize a society, just like the cell phones are a tool to make calls or doing a lot more things now.

However, if I asked this one question that everything boils down to, it'll be, "How old is your phone? Which year was your phone made?" Most of us don't have phones that's older than five years old, and every single year, if you have an iPhone or Android, most phones, phone companies refresh their phones.

So the system itself gets a refresh, gets an update that's adaptive to the environment that we are in.

When the American governmental system is made two hundred fifty years ago, that phones didn't exist for another hundred years.

And I think your point to the local elections really mattering is that how much we've just made these national elections a foregone conclusion, and, uh, that has to change.

[laughs]

But, uh, the re- the rest of ninety-nine names, I, I, I have no idea.

So I just feel like even though I have the ballot in my hands, I feel quite powerless in my vote because I really don't really understand who these people are.

Um, and the little information I do get are from TV or campaign ads.

And every time I watch it, it's like car ads, you know? Like, "Is today the day the best prices, the, this, the best election, lowest prices?" Or like, "Is this the person who's gonna fight for you?" Just it's the same rhetoric but with just different faces.

And one day I was driving home, and I just asked myself the question because I work in tech.

I thought, "You know, with this AI technology, this such a new and overwhelming technology we have that we never had before, can we do something or what's something good we can do?" And I felt like as soon as I asked the question, this idea came to me.

And I, I, it, that's why it was interesting, um, you know, when I first looked at this and when you first reached out to me, uh, and I had a couple questions, but I'm like, "Yeah, okay, I see what's going on here." Um, so what, where does this website stand at the moment? And what are your goals? What would you like to see out of this website? Are you getting a lot of traffic to the website or not so much yet?